Thanks to the ability to search for information on the Internet, anyone is able to keep abreast of all the news, get the information necessary for work or study, and expand their knowledge. However, the amount of data uploaded to the Web is constantly growing, and sometimes it is very difficult to find the necessary materials in this abundance.
In order not to be in such a situation, a person must have the ability to search for information on the Internet. To do this, you need to know how search engines work, be able to clearly compose a query and master some tricks that greatly simplify the search.
Search engine concept
Familiar to all of us Google and Yandex, or already forgotten by many Yahoo and Rambler are the main tools for finding information on the Internet. They are a complex system consisting of specialized programs and powerful computers. Its principle of operation is simple: the user forms a search query, and the system responds with a list of links to information sources. Links are arranged in order of relevance, that is, matching the request.
Initially, the Internet was a propertyfew organizations, and the amount of information contained in it is small. But gradually the situation changed. In 1994, the Yahoo.com website appeared, which, according to its creators, was supposed to search for the necessary information in open directories of sites. However, the speed of replenishment of the World Wide Web with new information was so high that the search in directories very quickly lost its usefulness. In the same 1994, the first full-fledged search engine WebCrawler was created to search for information on Internet resources, and three years later Google was launched and Yandex was announced.
Search engine characteristics
The growing amount of information requires the improvement of the main indicators of the quality of search engines. These include:
- Completeness, that is, the correspondence of the received list of links to the search query.
- Accuracy or match of found sources to query.
- Relevance of information.
- Search speed, expressed in the resistance of servers to loads. This ratio is expressed in direct proportion: the more queries formulated by users, the faster the search engine should respond to them.
- Visibility, which consists in providing the user with a more convenient selection of the sites he needs within the framework of the results issued by the system.
In order for the listed characteristics to be at the highest possible level, search engines use two main ways to find a resource.
The first is related to the hierarchicalinformation directory structure. The top lines are occupied by general categories ("Family", "Art", "Science"), which are subsequently divided into more specific sections (for example, in the category "Science" you can select the sections "Mathematics", "Physics", "History"). Sections are also divided into component parts, inside which there are even smaller elements - and so on to the lowest levels, in which the required information will already be located.
The second way to find information on the Internet is based on keywords. Any user request includes a certain number of lexemes most repeated in connection with the topic of interest, and the search engine provides a list of sites where they occur most often.
Search engine software components
To facilitate the search for information on the Internet and improve the quality of the information issued to the user, the programs included in the indexing module are constantly being improved. The process of the search engine is divided into three stages, each of which is operated by robots specially designed for this:
- Spider downloads web pages and extracts all links they contain.
- Crawler ("Traveling Spider") follows all the links extracted at the previous stage and determines further search directions.
- Indexer ("Indexer") analyzes all downloaded web pages for compliance with the information contained in them to the request.
Search engine hardware components
An important element of the functioning of the search engine is the server, which ensures the quality and speed of finding the necessary information. At the first stage of his work, he analyzes the user request. The results of the analysis are checked against all downloaded files and ranked according to the matching of the request with the found files. The resulting list can be adjusted by additional search terms set by the user.
According to the results of the previous stages, a snippet is formed - an annotation to the found sources, in which the words included in the query are highlighted. It is the snippet that the user sees on the search results page.
Steps of information search
First of all, you need to formulate a request. At this stage, the user should have a clear idea of what result he wants. Further, the course of the search procedure is planned. It refers to information retrieval strategies. On the Internet, specific sites or their directories can be used for this, a more thorough study of already known content or viewing ready-made databases (for example, digital libraries).
At the final stage, the required information is extracted from the results presented on the search results page.
Search technique
You can't ignore even seemingly elementary rules for finding information on the Internet, such as:
- checkspelling (despite the fact that modern search engines automatically correct mistakes made, the result can sometimes differ from what is needed if the query is incorrect);
- determining the purpose of the search (for example, for the query "laptop repair, price" the user can get a list of addresses of computer services, while he needed exactly the average cost of repairing a breakdown);
- setting the necessary restrictions (for example, in the previous example, the search engine could provide information about the cost of repairing laptops in St. Petersburg to a user living in Moscow, if he did not set the geographic search area).
But even with the observance of these principles, it is sometimes difficult to obtain the necessary information. The ability to search for information on the Internet suggests that the user has special skills that allow you to adjust the request.
Keyword search features
It is not necessary to enter detailed essays on the problem of interest into the search bar. In any case, the system will choose the most frequent words and, starting from them, will form the result. However, to refine the desired goal, you can use logical operators.
The "+" and "-" signs allow you to demand from the system that a certain word must be present or absent in the found sources. It is important that the sign is written together with the necessary word: "laptop repair + price".
Tothe search result literally matched the query, you need to put an exclamation mark next to it. The request "!price" will return only sites related to the cost of any service, and not scripts for children's matinees.
If you want to get an exact match for a phrase, and not a single word, this phrase must be enclosed in quotation marks. This is especially useful when using a quote you need to find a whole work or statement of a famous person.
Advanced search for information on the Internet
If all the previous tips did not help you get the desired result, you can use some additional features that are offered by each search engine. In particular, this applies to the possibility of advanced search.
The user is offered a number of filters, the use of which allows you to adjust the specified conditions. For example, you can set a strict sequence of words included in the query, indicate their location on the page, or refine the form of occurrence in the text. You can also set a pattern that the system should be guided by in the search process, for example, a specific site.
The advanced search function, among other things, offers the ability to specify the time of the publication of interest, as well as the region. If the user is looking for a certain document (law, regulation, publication of a work or historical source), he can immediately specify the required format.
Other search methods
The amount of data posted to the Network dailyincreases. Logic commands, advanced searches, or specialized search skills are often just one of many tools for finding the information you need.
One of the other ways to find information on the Internet is to follow hyperlinks found on a web page. This allows you to refine or expand the information already found or discover new ones. Another popular search method is by image. By uploading any photo to a search engine, the user can count on the system to find matches on it with other images and provide the necessary information about a person, object or phenomenon.
Finally, we should not forget that many companies or administrative bodies have their own websites, which may also contain the necessary information, which greatly facilitates the process of searching for information on the Internet.
